Case study: PDF AI tool made $25K in MRR Last Month

eb63067

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Statistics:

- Website: PDF.ai

- Launched On: 6th of June, 2023

- Revenue Last Month (September, 2023): $25,070

- Profit Last Month (September 2023): $17,600

- Monthly Website Traffic: 1,047,000

I did a whole breakdown of the winning marketing formula of PDF.ai on how they were able to scale so fast in just 4 months. Hope this is valuable. Let's dive in.

Description:

Founded by Damon in June of 2023, PDF.ai is one of the pioneer AI tools which allows users to chat with any PDF. It has already amassed over 350,000 users and just crossed over 1,000,000 monthly website visitors last month.

Growth Strategy:

PDF AI has been able to grow at such a fast pace using a combination of pillars including: their domain, search engine optimization (SEO), viral video content and referred traffic. It is important to note that all these marketing strategies have been able to work so much better due to the viral nature of the PDF AI tool and its applications.

For example, the virality of PDF AI has allowed them to be mentioned by different highly visited international websites like La Vanguardia, which is a major Spanish newspaper website that gets 100 million visitors per month. The organic post they made about PDF AI has allowed Damon to benefit from free referred traffic and exposure to the Spanish market, whilst also getting an SEO boost from the strong backlink and this whilst only having launched 4 months ago.

Damon also attributes a major driving factor of their early success to the purchase of the premium domain “PDF.ai”. This is because the domain is universally understood and also positions PDF AI as the main leader and pioneer in their field. Although this domain set back Damon $10,000, it helped him set his business apart from every other competitor and benefit from tremendous SEO growth. For example, as of last September PDF AI got 1,000,000 monthly website visitors of which 350,000 came from organic SEO traffic. A further interesting note is that over 50% of that organic traffic comes from the keyword “PDF AI” and related keywords like “AI PDF”. This in combination with the AI hype demonstrates the power of using a strong and relevant domain name.

Another strategy that helped PDF AI grow is that Damon hired a full-time influencer to post daily viral content on their Instagram account. Since their launch 4 months ago their account has already amassed over 20,000 followers with their most viral reel getting 115,000 likes. It is also interesting to note that Damon has partnered up with the TikTok team from David (founder of Jenni AI) to manage his socials and viral marketing strategy.

A final growth strategy which has the potential to compound over time is their newly introduced affiliate program which pays out 30% in commission on all payments within 12 months. This has shown to have worked very well for Jenni AI and most likely will be the same case for PDF AI. They already have affiliates which created their own landing pages like for example, AskPDF.xyz which is driving over 14,000 monthly website visitors per month.

Key Takeaway:

Focus on building a product that has a viral aspect to it and don’t underestimate the power of choosing your domain. If available, pick a domain which is short and directly represents the keyword of what your business does. This can help you stand out as the leader in your field and also allow you to benefit from getting easier organic SEO traffic.
 
@eb63067 Interesting breakdown! Unfortunately a lot of these steps are unattainable if you’re starting from scratch, I doubt my wife would be OK with me shelling out $10k for a domain, for example.

I really like the use cases section of the pdf.ai website and I am looking to build something similar for my own SaaS - seems like a great way to both shown up in rankings and introduce my product to potential users.
 
@budis10 Damon took a big risk and it paid off. Even though it's a big win, he had a few losses before so it's a learned experience. New entrepreneurs definitely shouldn't buy the domain first.
 
@eb63067 It seems a bit disingenuous that you are using stock photo people as your "happy users" and also that you list people who seem to be affiliated with this product within your "Wall of love", without any disclosure about their affiliation.

I also find it odd why you are not disclosing anywhere (as far as I can see) on the website, including in the Privacy Policy, who exactly is producing this service and where they are registered to and not only that, you are using additional measures to hide your information for example by using domain privacy feature on your domain name.
 
@mananon From the looks of it. Upload PDF and have openai load it up and you can ask it any questions and chatgpt will answer with the PDF context
 
@lanzzy That sounds a bit useful but i could just copy paste the pdf text myself in gpt and then ask follow-up questions on it.

It would have been be more useful if i could upload videos. Like yt videos and tutorials and then it can explain me what's in it and also i can ask questions about it.
 
@fayanth Won't, there is a 4k token limit, that means you can feed only a certain amount of data at once. How these apps process bigger data is by splitting it into smaller chunks and feed it. Openai don't have a pdf splitter available out of the box, but almost every tool out there uses it on background.
 
@fayanth No this is not the correct way, you need to use Retrieval Augmented Generation.

Passing bit by bit will not give you the results and will be very expensive
 
@fayanth no they breakdown the pdf and save it into their own database, when you ask questions to the pdf it only takes the relevant chunk ( relevant to your question ) and feeds it into openai to get the answer
 

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